Chocolaterie Pascoët, a small “laboratoire," or factory, in the Carouge district here, was a hive of activity on a recent morning. The team was scrambling to fill the last orders for Christmas.

A handful of chocolatiers quietly turned out fine pralines, the small squares moving over a conveyor belt to be coated with warm, dark chocolate. Other workers carefully packaged the morning’s output: fine Swiss chocolates that would be sold at a premium price: 29 Swiss francs for a box of 20.

Because of poor yields lately in producer countries like Ivory Coast, and a trend toward chocolate with a higher cocoa content, the global supply of cocoa has not kept up with demand. Chocolate prices in some markets are 40 per cent or more higher than this time last year.

Not that the market for premium Swiss chocolate is particularly price sensitive.

Most of the chocolates produced this season by Chocolaterie Pascoët will end up in the company’s three small shops in Geneva or the one in Morocco, or be sold to an elite clientele, including customers as far away as Dallas and Tokyo. Nearly 40 per cent will be packaged in elegant boxes bearing the names of prestigious companies like Rolls-Royce for corporate gifts.

Philippe Pascoët, the chocolatier who runs the business, produces a dazzling variety of flavors, from green-apple caramel and saffron to passion fruit. There is even a cigar-flavoured praline he creates by chopping fine Havanas into pieces, infusing them with crème fraiche, and afterward extracting the essential oils.

The cigar-flavoured treat is “a chocolate that should be eaten in its context," he said. “If you had it at the end of a good meal with a strong alcohol – a Cognac, an Armagnac or a good whiskey – that would be nice."

Chocolate confectionery is big business, providing more than 4000 jobs in Switzerland alone last year and earning 1.6 billion Swiss francs in revenue, nearly half of it in exports, according to industry data. And those figures, which count big producers like Nestlé, do not include artisanal chocolatiers like Mr. Pascoët and scores of others in Geneva, Zurich and other cities.

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Worldwide, though, analysts say the supply of chocolate cannot keep pace with people’s appetite, because of the cocoa shortage. Betting that prices will continue to rise, investors have been flocking to cocoa futures.

“Production isn’t rising, at least not as quickly as demand, so that’s a recipe for higher prices," said Michaela Kuhl, an analyst at Commerzbank in Frankfurt. The market imbalance has driven cocoa prices up by 40 per cent since the lows hit in the spring, she noted.

While there are more factors in chocolate’s price than just cocoa, a shift in tastes toward dark chocolate is helping drive the cost increase. According to the International Cocoa Organization, a trade group, cocoa makes up about one-tenth of the average chocolate bar. But dark chocolate is increasingly popular, and some contains more than 80 per cent cocoa.

Chocolate prices in the United States, for example, are on track to rise 45 per cent from 2012, to about $US5.75 a pound, according to a recent report from Euromonitor International, a market research firm. And British consumers are paying 25 per cent more this year for chocolate bars than last, Mintel, another research house, estimates.

No shortage is evident 135 kilometers, or 80 miles, northeast of Geneva in the village of Broc, where Nestlé’s premium-brand Maison Cailler factory has been humming away ahead of the holidays. Cailler, founded in 1819 but part of Nestlé since 1929, makes its product from scratch on its own premises, starting with raw cacao beans and milk from cows that graze on the Alpine meadows nearby.

Cailler’s annual output dwarfs Mr Pascoët’s. It roasts as much as 20 tons of beans a day, more than he sells in finished chocolate each year.

But the two producers, so different in scale, are united by their shared need for cocoa, which comes from mostly poor countries in a narrow band around the equator, led by Ivory Coast, Ghana and Indonesia.

The cocoa shortage stems partly from falling yields in Ivory Coast, where investment has been insufficient and rains unaccommodating. Nestlé, which also makes mass-market chocolate like its Crunch and Kit-Kat bars, is the world’s biggest consumer of cocoa, and has to worry more than most about its future supply.

José Lopez, the company’s executive vice president for operations, expressed confidence that the market would solve the shortage problem through the mechanics of higher prices, as farmers who might otherwise switch to rubber or palm oil trees step up their cocoa production.

“The right price," he said in an interview, “is the one that encourages people to continue in the activity and encourages their kids to take over from them."

To assure its future supply in countries like Ivory Coast, Nestlé has created an extensive “Cocoa Plan" with its own extension service to teach farmers better crop husbandry skills. It is also distributing hundreds of thousands of high-yielding, disease-resistant cocoa plants at cost.

Keeping supply and demand in balance, even with more investment in producing countries, will take some doing, however. One looming problem may be global warming, which some studies suggest will further reduce production as drier growing seasons reduce yields.

But the biggest challenge may be the evolution of the global market.

The Swiss, along with the Belgians and Icelanders, are the world’s leading chocoholics, with annual per capita cocoa consumption of nearly six kilograms, or 13 pounds. The United States is far behind the leaders at about 2.5 kilograms.

While Western chocolate consumption is growing slowly, emerging markets are booming. China’s 1.3 billion people, for example, each eat just 44 grams of cocoa each year on average now. But the market is expanding fast, particularly among newly wealthy urban Chinese.

Analysts expect chocolate demand to grow at least 10 per cent in China, Brazil and India over the next few years. If chocolate consumption rates in those countries were to begin approaching Western levels, there would not be enough chocolate to go around.